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‘A robin redbreast in a cage puts all Heaven in a rage’: Why this charming little bird is the nation’s favourite

Mark Cocker

We’re more emotionally connected to the robin than any other bird, says Mark Cocker, as he considers why we feel so much affection for this sweet-songed, yet feisty Christmas-card favourite.

When out recently on a Christmas walk, our family paused by a café thronged with people enjoying the midwinter sun. Suddenly, a robin appeared on the snow-topped wall within touching distance. Its orange breast burned brightly against the white and, almost as quickly as it arrived, our daughter-in-law made a gesture that I am tempted to say is hardwired in us. Out went an outstretched index finger, crooked as a perch for a wild bird. Just think for a moment about the gesture made by both parties in this tableau.

A crumb-seeking bird is hardly exceptional in this country — at Edale, near Kinder Scout in Derbyshire, I once saw a robin foraging inside the café among the tables and chairs — but that moment was noteworthy in this sense. It is replicated the length and breadth of these islands and has recurred for more than 1,000 years. It is party to a love affair between a people and their national bird that has few equals anywhere in the world.

One of the oldest descriptions of intimacy between a Briton and a robin — indeed, among the earliest evocations of any bird in our literature — dates to the 6th century. It recounts how Kentigern, patron saint of Glasgow, was so attached to one beloved robin, he brought it back from the dead. Even now, its image features in the city’s coat of arms.

Our singling out of this one bird is embedded even in the very name we use. We are so familiar that we can forget how robin is a shortening of Robert. An older name for the species was ‘redbreast’ and, earlier still, the ‘ruddock’. However, in the 19th century, it started to shift, firstly to ‘robin redbreast’ and, eventually, simply to ‘robin’.

Only two other British birds have Christian names in their official ornithological titles: ‘magpie’ (a shortening of Margaret) and ‘jackdaw’ — the latter is as much an onomato-poeic evocation of jackdaw calls as it is a version of John. To understand the singularity of robin, try to imagine its equivalent: that we might call grey herons Charles or refer to wrens only as Jennifers. Robin is unique.

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These islands hold an estimated 7.5 million pairs, making them one of our most common birds and they have even increased substantially since the 1980s, a period when so much of our wildlife has declined. It is a species closely associated with woodland and, in Europe, robins remain predominantly forest inhabitants and also characteristically shy. British birds are not only different in temperament, they possess brighter orange on the face and breast, with warmer olive-brown upperparts. These distinctions have led to recognition of the British population as a separate race, melophilus, which translates as ‘song loving’.

‘From Chaucer onwards, there is hardly an English poet until the Victorian period who didn’t celebrate the bird in verse’

Ironically, it was this vocal capability that led people to trap robins and keep them caged, as a source of domestic companionship and wild song. In turn, it was William Blake’s condemnation of the tradition that gave rise to one of the most famous robin references in all our poetry. In his Auguries of Innocence, he wrote: ‘A robin redbreast in a cage/Puts all Heaven in a rage.’

Yet, from Chaucer onwards, there is hardly an English poet until the Victorian period who didn’t celebrate the bird in verse. Wordsworth did so across 14 poems, although it is a casual prose reference, as much as anything, that captures our timeless attachment. ‘Our cats,’ he wrote, ‘having been banished the house, it was soon frequented by Red-breasts. Two or three of them, when the window was open, would come in, particularly when Mary [Wordsworth’s wife] was breakfasting alone.’

Perhaps the most powerful evidence for our national fixation is what we didn’t do to robins, unlike some of our European neighbours. In the early modern period, it was commonplace to eat species as small as robins and, in 18th-century France, they were widely trapped on migration for the pot. In some countries, such as Cyprus, the species is still eaten. Yet the British had ancient taboos against robin flesh. Even to take the eggs was said to cause your fingers to go crooked or your cattle to give bloody milk. Alongside the folklore were proverbs reinforcing these protective attitudes, sometimes with religious sanction: ‘Kill a robin or a wren/Never prosper boy or man’ or ‘The robin redbreast and the wren/Are God’s own gentlemen’.

In exchange, robins have shown exceptional trust in matters of nest location. The list of domestic sites they have used is astonishing: in abandoned kettles, saucepans, peg-bags, an unmade bed (as the owner had breakfast), the pocket of a gardener’s jacket (between breakfast and lunch), on a bedroom pelmet and in a living room on a row of books. Sometimes, the intimacy is literally rather close to the bone: such as the pair nesting in the skull of a man hanged for highway robbery. Occasionally, you can imagine that robins understand their wider symbolical importance, such as when you hear of a pair using a hole left by the cannon-ball in HMS Victory’s mast, above the spot where Nelson was fatally wounded.

One anomaly in our modern encounters with the robin is that its song often goes unrecognised and doesn’t perhaps have the reputation it deserves. Even more ironically, it is one of the easiest of all bird songs to master: because it is almost the only avian voice in Britain from August right through to winter.

These non-breeding songs come from males and females and are a way of organising their spatial separation in individual territories. They are notable for a rather wistful, melancholic quality — a soft, thin glissando running of scales that is both fleeting in quality and unfixed in location. Pinpointing the source as you cut through a wood is difficult and you can pass from one song territory to the next without ever seeing the authors of this delightful chain of music.

The robin will sing all year round, come snow or shine. Credit: Getty Images

A further striking aspect of robin song is the birds’ willingness to sing before dawn or after dusk. With the advent of artificial streetlights, robins will perform in the middle of the night, especially in urban settings. I vividly recall a prominent Fleet Street journalist telling me that they were so excited to hear a nightingale — their one and only encounter — when walking through London in midwinter. It seemed rather churlish to suggest that it was almost certainly a robin. A case of similar misidentification is proposed to explain another famous nocturnal song, in the 1940s tune A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, where philomel had probably not been heard for a century.

Apart from our gardens, there is one final place where we habitually expect to find Erithacus rubecula melophilus — on the chimneypiece during late December. No bird is more abundant on our Christmas cards, where the contrast of robin red and snow white is a designer’s dream. Yet, to understand this tradition, we have to turn to a radical reconstruction of the postal service in the 19th century.

It was the celebrated ornithologist David Lack, author of pioneering study The Life of the Robin (1943), who suggested that the livery worn by these Victorian postmen was red. He also established that the workers were themselves affectionately nicknamed ‘Robin’. This link between the bird and the postman further coincided with the creation of a new custom of sending each other special messages at Christmas time. All these connections were eventually summarised with cards that featured robins, the image often depicting a red-breasted bird with post in its bill.

There is a final irony to note about all this symbolic appropriation of robins. The red on the real bird is not there to spread goodwill among humankind: it is a signifier that communicates aggression between members of a highly territorial species. Robins will sometimes fight to the death. It was Lack himself who emphasised how inappropriate it was for a chimneypiece to hold a flock of such birds. However, rather than diminishing our love for the nation’s favourite, it should remind us that the living, breathing realities of Nature will always exceed our cultural projections. No matter how much we care, robins are always more than we can imagine.

Mark Cocker is a journalist who has written for The Guardian, The New Statesman and The Spectator